Tugboat Annie is a 1933 American pre-Code comedy-drama film directed by Mervyn LeRoy, written by Norman Reilly Raine and Zelda Sears, and starring Marie Dressler and Wallace Beery as a comically quarrelsome middle-aged couple who operate a tugboat. Dressler and Beery were MGM's most popular screen team at that time, having recently made the bittersweet Min and Bill (1930) together, for which Dressler won the Academy Award for Best Actress.
The boisterous Tugboat Annie character first appeared in a series of stories in the Saturday Evening Post written by the author Norman Reilly Raine which were supposedly based on the life of Thea Foss of Tacoma, Washington. There is also a theory that her character is loosely based on Kate A. Sutton, secretary and dispatcher for the Providence Steamboat Company during the 1920s.
Tugboat Annie also features Robert Young and Maureen O'Sullivan as the requisite pair of young lovers. Captain Clarence Howden piloted Annie's tugboat "Narcissus" (real name Wallowa), which was owned by Foss Tug and Barge of Tacoma and had been leased to MGM for the film. Howden's son Richard Howden is seen rolling rope during the credits.
Filmed in Seattle, Washington, Tugboat Annie used local residents as extras, including then-mayor John F. Dore. The tugboat used in the film, renamed Arthur Foss in 1934, is the oldest wooden tugboat afloat in the world and remains preserved by Northwest Seaport in Seattle.
Source: Wikipedia (CC BY-SA)
No comments yet — be the first.
Sign in — Sign in to leave a comment or review.